JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa and its citizens because all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours  whereas all the testing says not really.

Dr. Watsons remarks created a huge stir because they implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?

The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence. And others who later made the same argument  Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, in 1994, for example, and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate  have made the same mistake.

In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.

The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia...

There are differences. Unique characteristics and abilities should not be discarded as 'un PC' crap like it has been. Innate human characteristics should generally be developed IMO, not muted and suppressed.

JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa and its citizens because all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours  whereas all the testing says not really.

This is a stupid article about a stupid misconception.

First, James Watson is himself completely wrong - the social policies that have been tried are all based in one form or another of socialism - which doesn't work, anywhere on the planet.

Second, economic freedom, rooted in the protection of private property rights, has never been tried in Africa, due to the remnants of tribal culture - note that I say "culture", not intelligence, that still prevails there. Blacks are doing quite well anywhere the British or South African culture replaced the existing tribal culture.

Third, that there are in fact differences between the races is more than obvious - the fact that Africans from a certain part of Africa win all the marathons they care to enter being the easiest to demonstrate. However, my belief, and I think experience shows, that freedom and free enterprise work among every race.

An excellent response to this piece of total garbage by Nisbett. (Nisbett is one of my heroes by the way, just not today).

You have hit the nail on the head. The proof is in the results not the race of the cook. Social policies don’t fail because there is some hereditary IQ difference somewhere.

Nisbett is playing a favorite American Psychological Association game, in which a chosen APA heavy-hitter points out the obvious point that intelligence and skin color are not genetically linked. That’s a good enough point in its way, but not what Watson was saying at all.

Watson seems to me to have said that Africans have somewhat lower IQ according to some measure of central tendency. Some Africans are black, of course, but Watson didn’t say that Africans had lower IQ because they were black, nor did Herrnstein.

We find out whether or not Africans have a somewhat lower IQ by gathering IQ data. If they do, they do. The causal connection between skin color and IQ requires a different sort of proof than mere IQ data; it is an inherently suspect hypothesis anyway because of prior genetic research; and it is a racist hypothesis. However, rejection of the skin color-IQ link does not mean that IQ does not differ by continent or country or city or neighborhood. It probably does. Many other characteristics do.

If you (or society, or whoever) encourage or discourage the development of a trait for 25, 50, 100, 500 generations, it is not invalid at all to postulate that, over such extended time, changes in DNA occur that either reinforce or diminish the trait, on a survival basis if for no other reason.

If one's ancestors spent 50 generations running from assorted beasts in the jungle or on the veldt, it would hardly be surprising to find that the present-day genetic pool carried an excess of whatever genes encourage sprinting. The same is clearly true in the case of whatever genes encourage mental processes.

If mental processes are stimulated and used over generations, genes will adapt and propagate and those connected to mental processes will become enhanced; if not, then the reverse occurs, and genes will adapt to enhance other things and, to one extent or another, let mental processes diminish.

I believe there was a study with wild foxes, breeding them to enhance specific traits and find out how many generations it would take to basically domesticate them.
After something like seven generations, they were able to make them lose most of their wild traits and become pretty much like house dogs.
They still looked exactly like wild foxes.

These types of speculations about how there are only slight differences in the genetics between races don’t really cut the mustard in terms of proving anything.

For instance, there is a gene in humans (and many other animals) called FoxP2. It is called the “speech gene”, and for good reason. They have discovered families where there is an inherited mutation in FoxP2 and the people literally can’t talk.

So there are some tremendously important traits and abilities in humans that are controlled by a paltry few genes. The human genome has something like 100,000 genes, and a defect in one - ONE - the FoxP2 gene can make the person unable to speak.

Personally, I’ve always been very curious to know what would happen if they took the human FoxP2 and put it into a beagle or something.

12
posted on 12/11/2007 12:03:09 AM PST
by djf
(Send Fred some bread! Not a whole loaf, a slice or two will do!)

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